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Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film, directed by and starring Orson Welles. It was Welles's first feature film. The film was nominated for Academy Awards in nine categories; it won an Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay) by Herman Mankiewicz and Welles. Often considered by critics, filmmakers and fans to be the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane was voted the greatest film of all time in five consecutive Sight & Sound's polls of critics, until it was displaced by Vertigo in the 2012 poll. It topped the American Film Institute's 100 Years ... 100 Movies list in 1998, as well as the AFI's 2007 update. Citizen Kane is particularly praised for its innovative cinematography, music, and narrative structure. The story is a film à clef that examines the life and legacy of Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles, a character based in part upon the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, Chicago tycoons Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick, and aspects of Welles's own life. Upon its release, Hearst prohibited mention of the film in any of his newspapers. Kane's career in the publishing world is born of idealistic social service, but gradually evolves into a ruthless pursuit of power. Narrated principally through flashbacks, the story is revealed through the research of a newsreel reporter seeking to solve the mystery of the newspaper magnate's dying word: "Rosebud". After his success in the theatre with his Mercury Players, and his controversial 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds on The Mercury Theatre on the Air, Welles was courted by Hollywood. He signed a contract with RKO Pictures in 1939. Unusual for an untried director, he was given the freedom to develop his own story and use his own cast and crew, and was given final cut privilege. Following two abortive attempts to get a project off the ground, he developed the screenplay of Citizen Kane with Herman Mankiewicz. Principal photography took place in 1940 and the film received its American release in 1941. While a critical success, Citizen Kane failed to recoup its costs at the box office. The film faded from view soon after its release but its reputation was restored, initially by French critics, especially Jean-Paul Sartre, and more widely after its American revival in 1956. The film was released on Blu-ray Disc September 13, 2011, for a special 70th anniversary edition. Plot Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), an enormously wealthy media proprietor, has been living alone in Florida in his vast palatial estate Xanadu for the last years of his life, with a "No trespassing" sign on the gate. He dies in a bed while holding a snow globe and utters "Rosebud ..."; the globe slips from his dying hand and smashes. Kane's death then becomes sensational news around the world. Newsreel reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) tries to find out about Kane's private life and, in particular, to discover the meaning behind his last word. The reporter interviews the great man's friends and associates, and Kane's story unfolds as a series of flashbacks. Thompson approaches Kane's second wife, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), now an alcoholic who runs her own club, but she refuses to tell him anything. Thompson then goes to the private archive of the late Walter Parks Thatcher (George Coulouris), a banker who served as Kane's guardian during his childhood and adolescence. It is through Thatcher's written memoirs that Thompson learns about Kane's childhood. Thompson then interviews Kane's personal business manager Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), best friend Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), Susan for a second time, and Kane's butler Raymond (Paul Stewart) at Xanadu. Flashbacks reveal that Kane's childhood was spent in poverty in Colorado (his parents ran a boarding house), until the "world's third largest gold mine" was discovered on the seemingly worthless property his mother had acquired. He is forced to leave his mother (Agnes Moorehead) when she sends him away to the East Coast of the U.S. to live with Thatcher, to be educated. After gaining full control over his possessions at the age of 25, Kane enters the newspaper business with sensationalized yellow journalism. He takes control of the newspaper, the New York Inquirer, and hires all the best journalists. His attempted rise to power is documented, including his manipulation of public opinion for the Spanish American War; his first marriage to Emily Monroe Norton (Ruth Warrick), a President's niece; and his campaign for the office of governor of New York State, for which alternative newspaper headlines are created depending on the result. Kane's marriage disintegrates over the years, and he begins an affair with Susan Alexander. Both his wife and his opponent discover the affair, simultaneously ending his marriage and his political career. Kane marries his mistress, and forces her into an operatic career for which she has neither talent nor ambition. Kane finally allows her to abandon her singing career after she attempts suicide, but after a span of time spent in boredom and isolation in Xanadu, she ultimately leaves him. Kane spends his last years building his vast estate and lives alone, interacting only with his staff. The butler recounts that Kane had said "Rosebud" after Susan left him, right after seeing a snow globe. At Xanadu, Kane's vast number of belongings are being catalogued, ranging from priceless works of art to worthless furniture. During this time, Thompson finds that he is unable to solve the mystery and concludes that "Rosebud" will forever remain an enigma. He theorizes that "Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he lost." In the ending of the film, it is revealed to the audience that Rosebud was the name of the sled from Kane's childhood – an allusion to the only time in his life that he was truly happy. The sled, thought to be junk, is burned and destroyed in a basement furnace by Xanadu's departing staff. Production Development Orson Welles's notoriety following The War of the Worlds broadcast earned him Hollywood's interest, and RKO studio head George J. Schaefer's unusual contract. Welles made a deal with Schaefer on July 21, 1939, to produce, direct, write, and act in two feature films. The studio had to approve the story and the budget if it exceeded $500,000. Welles was allowed to develop the story without interference, cast his own actors and crew members, and have the privilege of final cut – unheard of at the time for a first-time director. He had spent the first five months of his RKO contract trying to get several projects going with no success. The Hollywood Reporter said, "They are laying bets over on the RKO lot that the Orson Welles deal will end up without Orson ever doing a picture there." First, Welles tried to adapt Heart of Darkness, but there was concern over the idea of depicting it entirely with point of view shots. Welles considered adapting Cecil Day-Lewis' novel The Smiler With The Knife, but realized that to challenge himself with a new medium, he had to write an original story. Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz was recuperating from a car accident and in-between jobs. He had originally been hired by Welles to work on The Campbell Playhouse radio program and was available to work on the screenplay for Welles's film. The writer had only received two screenplay credits between 1935 and his work on Citizen Kane and needed the job. There is dispute amongst historians regarding whose idea it was to use William Randolph Hearst as the basis for Charles Foster Kane. Welles claimed it was his idea while film critic Pauline Kael (in her 1971 essay "Raising Kane") and Welles's former business partner John Houseman claim that it was Mankiewicz's idea. For some time, Mankiewicz had wanted to write a screenplay about a public figure – perhaps a gangster – whose story would be told by the people that knew him. Mankiewicz had already written an unperformed play about John Dillinger entitled The Tree Will Grow. Welles liked the idea of multiple viewpoints but was not interested in playing Dillinger. Mankiewicz and Welles talked about picking someone else to use as a model. They hit on the idea of using Hearst as their central character. Mankiewicz had frequented Hearst's parties until his alcoholism got him barred. The writer resented this and became obsessed with Hearst and Marion Davies. Hearst had great influence and the power to retaliate within Hollywood so Welles had Mankiewicz work on the script outside of the city. Because of the writer's drinking problem, Houseman went along to provide assistance and make sure that he stayed focused. Welles also sought inspiration from Howard Hughes and Samuel Insull (who built an opera house for his wife). Although Mankiewicz and Houseman got on well with Welles, they incorporated some of his traits into Kane, such as his temper. During production, Citizen Kane was referred to as RKO 281. Most of the filming took place between June 29, 1940 and October 23, 1940 in what is now Stage 19 on the Paramount lot in Hollywood. There was some location filming with Balboa Park in San Diego and San Diego Zoo; and still photographs of Oheka Castle in Huntington, New York were used in the opening montage representing Kane's Xanadu estate. Welles prevented studio executives of RKO from visiting the set. He understood their desire to control projects and he knew they were expecting him to do an exciting film that would correspond to his The War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Welles's RKO contract had given him complete control over the production of the film when he signed on with the studio, something that he never again was allowed to exercise when making motion pictures. According to an RKO cost sheet from May 1942, the film cost $839,727 compared to an estimated budget of $723,800. Pre-release controversy Welles ran a closed set, limited access to dailies and managed the publicity of Kane to make sure that its influence from Hearst's life was a secret. Publicity materials stated the film's inspiration was Faust. RKO hoped to release the film in mid-February 1941. Writers for national magazines had early deadlines and so a rough cut was previewed for a select few on January 3, 1941. Friday magazine ran an article drawing point-by-point comparisons between Kane and Hearst and documented how Welles had led on Louella Parsons, Hollywood correspondent for Hearst papers, and made a fool of her in public. Reportedly, she was furious and demanded an immediate preview of the film. James Stewart, who was present at the screening, said that she walked out of the film. Soon after, Parsons called George Schaefer and threatened RKO with a lawsuit if they released Kane. The next day, the front page headline in Daily Variety read, "HEARST BANS RKO FROM PAPERS." In two weeks, the ban was lifted for everything except Kane. The Hollywood Reporter ran a front-page story on January 13 that Hearst papers were about to run a series of editorials attacking Hollywood's practice of hiring refugees and immigrants for jobs that could be done by Americans. The goal was to put pressure on the other studios in order to force RKO to shelve Kane. Soon afterwards, Schaefer was approached by Nicholas Schenck, head of MGM's parent company, with an offer on the behalf of Louis B. Mayer and other Hollywood executives to reimburse RKO if it would destroy the film. Once RKO's legal team reassured Schaefer, the studio announced on January 21 that Kane would be released as scheduled and with one of the largest promotional campaigns in the studio's history. Schaefer brought Welles to New York City for a private screening of the film with the New York corporate heads of the studios and their lawyers. There was no objection to its release provided that certain changes, including the removal or softening of specific references that might offend Hearst, were made. Welles agreed, and editor Robert Wise (who later became a celebrated film director himself in the 1950s and 60s) was brought in to cut the running time from two hours, two minutes, and 40 seconds to one hour, 59 minutes, and 16 seconds. That cut satisfied the corporate lawyers. Screenplay Development Mankiewicz as co-writer Robert Carringer, author of The Making of Citizen Kane (1985), described the early stages of the screenplay: Welles's first step toward the realization of Citizen Kane was to seek the assistance of a screenwriting professional. Fortunately, help was near at hand. . . . When Welles moved to Hollywood, it happened that a veteran screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz, was recuperating from an automobile accident and between jobs ... Mankiewicz was an expatriate from Broadway who had been writing for films for almost fifteen years. Mankiewicz met newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst as a result of his friendship with Charles Lederer, another Hollywood screenwriter, who was a close nephew of Marion Davies, Hearst's mistress. Film critic Pauline Kael wrote that "Mankiewicz found himself on story-swapping terms with the power behind it all, Hearst himself ... through his friendship with Charles Lederer." Mankiewicz eventually saw Hearst as "a finagling, calculating, Machiavellian figure," notes Kael, and he and Lederer often wrote and had printed parodies of Hearst newspapers ..." Mankiewicz, according to film author Harlan Lebo, he was also "one of Hollywood's most notorious personalities." Mankiewicz was the older brother of producer-director Joseph Mankiewicz and was a former writer for The New Yorker and The New York Times and had moved to Hollywood in 1926. By the time Welles contacted him he had "established himself as a brilliant wit, a writer of extraordinary talent, and a warm friend to many of the screen world's brightest artists ... he produced dialogue of the highest caliber." "Herman Mankiewicz was a legendary figure in Hollywood," wrote Welles's associate John Houseman: The son of a respected New Jersey schoolteacher, one of a brilliant class at Columbia, he had fought the war as a Marine, worked for the World and the Times, collaborated on two unsuccessful plays with two otherwise infallibly successful playwrights, George Kaufman and Marc Connelly, come to California for six weeks to work on a silent film for Lon Chaney and stayed for sixteen years as one of the highest paid and most troublesome men in the business. His behavior, public and private, was a scandal. A neurotic drinker and a compulsive gambler, he was also one of the most intelligent, informed, witty, humane and charming men I have ever known. Speaking with Peter Bogdanovich in February 1969, Orson Welles said, "Nobody was more miserable, more bitter, and funnier than Mank ... a perfect monument of self-destruction. But, you know, when the bitterness wasn't focused straight at you, he was the best company in the world." When Bogdanovich asked how important Mankiewicz was to the Citizen Kane script, Welles responded, "Mankiewicz's contribution? It was enormous." Welles had engaged Mankiewicz to do script work on the stalled film project The Smiler with a Knife. Despite a violent quarrel with Houseman in December 1939, after which Houseman had resigned from the Mercury, Welles arranged a lunch at New York's 21 Club with his former partner and proposed that he work with Mankiewicz on a new project — "little more than a notion, but an exciting one," Houseman wrote: Mankiewicz was notoriously unreliable: I asked Orson why he didn't take over the idea and write it himself. He said he didn't want to do that. Besides, Mank had asked for me to work with him. In the name of our former association Orson urged me to fly out, talk to Mankiewicz and, if I shared his enthusiasm, stay and work with him as his collaborator and editor till the script was done. It was an absurd venture, and that night Orson and I flew back to California together. In February 1940 Mankiewicz was put on the Mercury payroll to work on a script with Houseman, a screenplay initially called Orson Welles #1, then American, then Citizen Kane. Writing took place from late February or March through early May 1940. After finishing the script for Citizen Kane, Mankiewicz gave a copy to Lederer, which Kael explains was foolish: He was so proud of his script that he lent a copy to Charles Lederer. In some crazily naive way, Mankiewicz seems to have imagined that Lederer would be pleased by how good it was. But Lederer, apparently, was deeply upset and took the script to his aunt and Hearst. It went from them to Hearst's lawyers ... It was probably as a result of Mankiewicz's idiotic indiscretion that the various forces were set in motion that resulted in the cancellation of the premiere at the Radio City Music Hall and the commercial failure of Citizen Kane. Lederer, however, told director Peter Bogdanovich that Kael was wrong in her conclusion, noting that "she never bothered to check with him" about the facts. According to Lederer, he never did give the script to Davies. Lederer explains: I gave it back to him. He asked me if I thought Marion would be offended and I said I didn't think so. Ideas and collaboration According to film historian Clinton Heylin, "the idea of Citizen Kane was the original conception of Orson Welles, who in early 1940 first discussed the idea with John Houseman, who then suggested that both he and Welles leave for Los Angeles and discuss the idea with scriptwriter Herman Mankiewicz." He adds that Mankiewicz "probably believed that Welles had little experience as an original scriptwriter ... and may even have felt that John Citizen USA, Welles's working title, was a project he could make his own." When Houseman returned to California, he sat by the bedside of Mankiewicz — who was convalescing with a triple fracture of his left leg — and heard the basic outline of the story. "It was something he had been thinking about for years," Houseman wrote, "the idea of telling a man's private life (preferably one that suggested a recognizable American figure), immediately following his death, through the intimate and often incompatible testimony of those who had known him at different times and in different circumstances." Welles himself had ideas that meshed with that concept, as he described in a 1969 interview in the book, This is Orson Welles: I'd been nursing an old notion – the idea of telling the same thing several times – and showing exactly the same thing from wholly different points of view. Basically, the idea Rashomon used later on. Mank liked it, so we started searching for the man it was going to be about. Some big American figure – couldn't be a politician, because you'd have to pinpoint him. Howard Hughes was the first idea. But we got pretty quickly to the press lords. Hearst as story model According to film critic and author Pauline Kael, Mankiewicz "was already caught up in the idea of a movie about Hearst" when he was still working at The New York Times, in 1925. She learned from his family's babysitter, Marion Fisher, that she once typed as "he dictated a screenplay, organized in flashbacks. She recalls that he had barely started on the dictation, which went on for several weeks, when she remarked that it seemed to be about William Randolph Hearst, and he said, 'You're a smart girl.'" In Hollywood, Mankiewicz had frequented Hearst's parties until his alcoholism got him barred. And Hearst was also a person known to Welles. "Once that was decided", wrote author Don Kilbourne, "Mankiewicz, Welles, and John Houseman, a cofounder of the Mercury Theatre, rented a place in the desert, and the task of creating Citizen Kane began." This "place in the desert" was on the historic Verde ranch on the Mojave River in Victorville. In later years, Houseman gave Mankiewicz "total" credit for "the creation of Citizen Kane's script" and credited Welles with "the visual presentation of the picture." Mankiewicz was put under contract by Mercury Productions and was to receive no credit for his work as he was hired as a script doctor. According to his contract with RKO, Welles would be given sole screenplay credit, and had already written a rough script consisting of 300 pages of dialogue with occasional stage directions under the title of John Citizen, USA. Authorship Three men sit in chairs outside a house, a bald man in his forties is sitting in the centre next to a table between the two younger men. The man on the right has his feet on the table and is holding a screenplay. the older man is having his brow wiped by a nurse who is standing over him. Welles visiting Mankiewicz (center) in the California desert while in the process of writing Citizen Kane. John Houseman (right) is holding a copy of the screenplay. One of the long standing debates of Citizen Kane has been the proper accreditation of the authorship of the screenplay, which the credits attribute to both Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles. Mankiewicz biographer Richard Meryman notes that the dispute had various causes, including the way the film was promoted. For instance, when RKO opened the film on Broadway on May 1, 1941, followed by showings at theaters in other large cities, the publicity programs that were printed included photographs of Welles as "the one-man band, directing, acting, and writing." In a letter to his father afterward, Mankiewicz wrote, "I'm particularly furious at the incredibly insolent description of how Orson wrote his masterpiece. The fact is that there isn't one single line in the picture that wasn't in writing – writing from and by me – before ever a camera turned." Film historian Otto Friedrich wrote, "it made Mankiewicz unhappy to hear Welles quoted in Louella Parsons's column, before the question of screen credits was officially settled, as saying, 'So I wrote Citizen Kane. ... Welles later claimed that he planned on a joint credit all along, but Mankiewicz claimed that Welles offered him a bonus of ten thousand dollars if he would let Welles take full credit." Controversy over the authorship of the Citizen Kane screenplay was revived in 1971 by film critic Pauline Kael, whose essay, "Raising Kane," was printed in two installments in The New Yorker (February 20 and 27, 1971) and subsequently collected in The Citizen Kane Book (1971). According to Kael, Rita Alexander, Mankiewicz's personal secretary, stated that she "took the dictation from Mankiewicz from the first paragraph to the last ... and later did the final rewriting and the cuts, and handled the script at the studio until after the film was shot. ... said Welles didn't write (or dictate) one line of the shooting script of Citizen Kane. She added that "Welles himself came to dinner once or twice ... and she didn't meet him until after Mankiewicz had finished dictating the long first draft." However Welles had his own secretary, Katherine Trosper, who typed up Welles's suggestions and corrections, which were incorporated into the final script; Kael did not interview Trosper before producing her article. Nevertheless, Kael maintained that Mankiewicz went to the Writers Guild and declared that he was the original author. According to Pauline Kael, "he had ample proof of his authorship, and when he took his evidence to the Screen Writers Guild ... Welles was forced to split the credit and take second place in the listing."16:38 Charles Lederer, a screenwriter and a source for Kael's article, insisted that the credit never came to the Screen Writers Guild for arbitration. Kael argued that Mankiewicz was the true author of the screenplay and therefore responsible for much of what made the film great. This angered many critics of the day, most notably critic-turned-filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, a close friend of Welles who rebutted Kael's claims in an October 1972 article for Esquire titled "The Kane Mutiny." Other rebuttals included articles by Joseph McBride (Film Heritage, Fall 1971) and Jonathan Rosenbaum (Film Comment, Spring 1972 and Summer 1972), interviews with George Coulouris and Bernard Herrmann that appeared in Sight & Sound (Spring 1972), and remarks in Welles biographies by Barbara Leaming and Frank Brady. Rosenbaum also reviews the controversy in his editor's notes to This is Orson Welles (1992). "I happen to disagree with the premise of the whole book, because she tries to pretend that Welles is nothing and that a mediocre writer by the name of Mankiewicz was a hidden Voltaire," Bernard Herrmann said during a question-and-answer session following an October 1973 lecture at the George Eastman House Museum in Rochester, New York. "I'm not saying that Mankiewicz made no contribution. The titles clearly credit him. Orson says that he did make a valuable contribution. But really, without Orson, all of Mankiewicz's other pictures were nothing, before and after. With Orson, however, something happened to this wonderful man, but he could not have created Citizen Kane." Robert L. Carringer likewise rebutted Kael's conclusions in an article titled "The Scripts of Citizen Kane" for the Winter 1978 edition of Critical Enquiry. Carringer refers to early script drafts with Welles's incorporated handwritten contributions, and mentions the issues raised by Kael rested on the evidence of an early draft which was mostly written by Mankiewicz. However Carringer points out that subsequent drafts clarified Welles's contribution to the script: Fortunately enough evidence to settle the matter has survived. A virtually complete set of script records for Citizen Kane has been preserved in the archives of RKO General Pictures in Hollywood, and these provide almost a day-to-day record of the history of the scripting ... The full evidence reveals that Welles's contribution to the Citizen Kane script was not only substantial but definitive. Carringer notes that Mankiewicz' principal contribution was on the first two drafts of the screenplay, which he characterizes as being more like "rough gatherings" than actual drafts. Houseman accompanied Mankiewicz so as to ensure that the latter's drinking problem did not affect the screenplay. The early drafts established "the plot logic and laid down the overall story contours, established the main characters, and provided numerous scenes and lines that would eventually appear in one form or another in the film." However he also noted that Kane in the early draft remained a caricature of Hearst rather than the fully developed character of the final film. The main quality missing in the early drafts but present in the final film is "the stylistic wit and fluidity that is the most engaging trait of the film itself." According to film critic David Thomson, however, "No one can now deny Herman Mankiewicz credit for the germ, shape, and pointed language of the screenplay, but no one who has seen the film as often as it deserves to be seen would dream that Welles is not its only begetter." Carringer considered that at least three scenes were solely Welles's work and, after weighing both sides of the argument, including sworn testimony from Mercury assistant Richard Baer, concluded, "We will probably never know for sure, but in any case Welles had at last found a subject with the right combination of monumentality, timeliness, and audacity." Harlan Lebo agrees, and adds, "of far greater relevance is reaffirming the importance of the efforts that both men contributed to the creation of Hollywood's greatest motion picture." Carringer notes that Citizen Kane was unusual in relation to his later films in that it was original material rather than adaptations of existing sources. He cites that Mankiewicz's main contribution was providing him with "what any good first writer ought to be able to provide in such a case: a solid, durable story structure on which to build." For his part, Welles stated the process of collaborating with Mankiewicz on the Citizen Kane screenplay in a letter to The Times (London), November 17, 1971: The initial ideas for this film and its basic structure were the result of direct collaboration between us; after this we separated and there were two screenplays: one written by Mr. Mankiewicz, in Victorville, and the other, in Beverly Hills, by myself. ... The final version of the screenplay ... was drawn from both sources. In his 1982 chronicle of the studio, The RKO Story, scholar Richard B. Jewell concluded the following: Besides producing, directing and playing the role of Kane, Welles deserved his co-authorship credit (with Herman J. Mankiewicz) on the screenplay. Film critic Pauline Kael argues otherwise in a 50,000 word essay on the subject, but her case against Welles is one-sided and unsupported by the facts. Filmmaking innovations Orson Welles said that his preparation before making Citizen Kane was to watch John Ford's Stagecoach 40 times.66 "A lot of people ought to study Stagecoach," Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. "I wanted to learn how to make movies, and that's such a classically perfect one — don't you think so?" As it turned out, the first day I ever walked onto a set was my first day as a director. I'd learned whatever I knew in the projection room — from Ford. After dinner every night for about a month, I'd run Stagecoach, often with some different technician or department head from the studio, and ask questions. "How was this done?" "Why was this done?" It was like going to school. Cinematography A stern looking man and a woman sit on the right side of a table with documents on the table. A top hat is on the table. An unkempt man stands to the left of the picture. In the background a boy can be seen through a window playing in the snow. A deep focus shot: everything, including the hat in the foreground and the boy (young Kane) in the distance, is in sharp focus. Film scholars and historians view Citizen Kane as Welles's attempt to create a new style of filmmaking by studying various forms of film making, and combining them all into one. However, in an interview in March 1960 with the BBC's Huw Wheldon, Welles stated that his love for cinema began only when he started the work on Citizen Kane, and when asked where he got the confidence from as a first-time director to direct a film so radically different from contemporary cinema, he responded, "From ignorance ... sheer ignorance. There is no confidence to equal it. It's only when you know something about a profession that you are timid or careful." The most innovative technical aspect of Citizen Kane is the extended use of deep focus. In nearly every scene in the film, the foreground, background and everything in between are all in sharp focus. This was done by cinematographer Gregg Toland through his experimentation with lenses and lighting. Specifically, Toland often used telephoto lenses to shoot close-up scenes. Any time deep focus was impossible – for example in the scene when Kane finishes a bad review of Alexander's opera while at the same time firing the person who started the review – an optical printer was used to make the whole screen appear in focus (visually layering one piece of film onto another). However, some apparently deep-focus shots were the result of in-camera effects, as in the famous example of the scene where Kane breaks into Susan Alexander's room after her suicide attempt. In the background, Kane and another man break into the room, while simultaneously the medicine bottle and a glass with a spoon in it are in closeup in the foreground. The shot was an in-camera matte shot. The foreground was shot first, with the background dark. Then the background was lit, the foreground darkened, the film rewound, and the scene re-shot with the background action. Another unorthodox method used in the film was the way low-angle shots were used to display a point of view facing upwards, thus allowing ceilings to be shown in the background of several scenes. Since films were primarily filmed on sound stages and not on location during the era of the Hollywood studio system, it was impossible to film at an angle that showed ceilings because the stages had none. In some instances, Welles's crew used muslin draped above the set to produce the illusion of a regular room with a ceiling, while the boom microphones were hidden above the cloth and even dug a trench into the floor to allow the low-angle shot to be used in the scene where Kane meets Leland after his election loss. Toland had approached Welles in 1940 to work on Citizen Kane. Welles's reputation for experimentation in the theatre appealed to Toland and he found a sympathetic partner to "test and prove several ideas generally being accepted as radical in Hollywood". Welles credited Toland on the same card as himself. "It's impossible to say how much I owe to Gregg. He was superb," Welles said. Storytelling techniques Citizen Kane eschews the traditional linear, chronological narrative and tells Kane's story entirely in flashback using different points of view, many of them from Kane's aged and forgetful associates, the cinematic equivalent of the unreliable narrator in literature. Welles also dispenses with the idea of a single storyteller and uses multiple narrators to recount Kane's life. The use of multiple narrators was unheard of in Hollywood films. Each narrator recounts a different part of Kane's life, with each story partly overlapping. The film depicts Kane as an enigma, a complicated man who, in the end, leaves viewers with more questions than answers as to his character, such as the newsreel footage where he is attacked for being both a communist and a fascist. The technique of using flashbacks had been used in earlier films such as Wuthering Heights in 1939 and The Power and the Glory in 1933 but no film was so immersed in this technique as Citizen Kane. The use of the reporter Thompson acts as a surrogate for the audience, questioning Kane's associates and piecing together his life. One of the narrative voices is the News on the March segment. Its stilted dialogue and portentous voiceover is a parody of The March of Time newsreel series which itself references an earlier newsreel which showed the 85-year old arms czar Sir Basil Zaharoff getting wheeled to his train. Welles had earlier provided voiceovers for the March of Time radio show. Citizen Kane makes extensive use of stock footage to create the newsreel. One of the story-telling techniques used in Citizen Kane was the use of montage to collapse time and space. Using an episodic sequence on the same set while the characters changed costume and make-up between cuts so that the scene following each cut would look as if it took place in the same location, but at a time long after the previous cut. In the breakfast montage, Welles chronicles the breakdown of Kane's first marriage in five vignettes that condense 16 years of story time into two minutes of screen time. Welles said that the idea for the breakfast scene "was stolen from The Long Christmas Dinner of Thornton Wilder ... a one-act play, which is a long Christmas dinner that takes you through something like 60 years of a family's life." Special effects Welles also pioneered several visual effects in order to cheaply shoot things like crowd scenes and large interior spaces. For example, the scene where the camera in the opera house rises dramatically to the rafters to show the workmen showing a lack of appreciation for the second Mrs. Kane's performance was shot by a camera craning upwards over the performance scene, then a curtain wipe to a miniature of the upper regions of the house, and then another curtain wipe matching it again with the scene of the workmen. Other scenes effectively employed miniatures to make the film look much more expensive than it truly was, such as various shots of Xanadu. A loud, full-screen closeup of a typewriter typing a single word ("weak"), magnifies the review for the Chicago Inquirer. Makeup The make-up artist Maurice Seiderman created the make-up for the film. RKO wanted the young Kane to look handsome and dashing, and Seiderman transformed the overweight Welles, beginning with his nose, which Welles always disliked. For the old Kane, Seiderman created a red plastic compound which he applied to Welles, allowing the wrinkles to move naturally. Kane's mustache was made of several hair tufts. Transforming Welles into the old Kane required six to seven hours, meaning he had to start at two in the morning to begin filming at nine. He would hold conferences while sitting in the make-up chair; sometimes working 16 hours a day. Even breaking a leg during filming could not stop him from directing around the clock, and he quickly returned to acting, using a steel leg brace. Soundtrack "Before Kane, nobody in Hollywood knew how to set music properly in movies," wrote filmmaker François Truffaut in a 1967 essay. "Kane was the first, in fact the only, great film that uses radio techniques." Behind each scene, there is a resonance which gives it its color: the rain on the windows of the cabaret, "El Rancho," when the investigator goes to visit the down-and-out female singer who can only "work" Atlantic City; the echoes in the marble-lined Thatcher library; the overlapping voices whenever there are several characters. A lot of filmmakers know enough to follow Auguste Renoir's advice to fill the eyes with images at all costs, but only Orson Welles understood that the sound track had to be filled in the same way. In addition to expanding on the potential of sound as a creator of moods and emotions, Welles pioneered a new aural technique, known as the "lightning-mix". Welles used this technique to link complex montage sequences via a series of related sounds or phrases. In offering a continuous sound track, Welles was able to join what would otherwise be extremely rough cuts together into a smooth narrative. For example, the audience witnesses Kane grow from a child into a young man in just two shots. As Kane's guardian hands him his sled, Kane begrudgingly wishes him a "Merry Christmas". Suddenly we are taken to a shot of his guardian fifteen years later, only to have the phrase completed for us: "and a Happy New Year". In this case, the continuity of the soundtrack, not the image, is what makes for a seamless narrative structure. Welles also carried over techniques from radio not yet popular in films (though they would become staples). Using a number of voices, each saying a sentence or sometimes merely a fragment of a sentence, and splicing the dialogue together in quick succession, the result gave the impression of a whole town talking – and, equally important, what the town was talking about. Welles also favored the overlapping of dialogue, considering it more realistic than the stage and film tradition of characters not stepping on each other's sentences. He also pioneered the technique of putting the audio ahead of the visual in scene transitions (a J-cut); as a scene would come to a close, the audio would transition to the next scene before the visuals did. Music In common with using personnel he had previously worked with in the Mercury Theatre, Welles recruited his close friend Bernard Herrmann to score Citizen Kane. Herrmann was a longtime collaborator with Welles, providing music for almost all his radio broadcasts including The Fall of the City (1937) and the War of the Worlds (1938) broadcast. The film was Herrmann's first motion picture score and would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score, but would lose out to his own score for the film All That Money Can Buy. Herrmann's score for Citizen Kane was a watershed in film soundtrack composition and proved as influential as any of the film's other innovations, establishing him as an important voice in film soundtrack composition. The score eschewed the typical Hollywood practice of scoring a film with virtually non-stop music. Instead Herrmann used what he later described as '"radio scoring", musical cues which typically lasted between five and fifteen seconds to bridge the action or suggest a different emotional response. One of the most effective musical cues was the "Breakfast Montage." The scene begins with a graceful waltz theme and gets darker with each variation on that theme as the passage of time leads to the hardening of Kane's personality and the breakup of his marriage to Emily. Herrmann realized that musicians slated to play his music were hired for individual unique sessions; there was no need to write for existing ensembles. This meant that he was free to score for unusual combinations of instruments, even instruments that are not commonly heard. In the opening sequence, for example, the tour of Kane's estate Xanadu, Herrmann introduces a recurring leitmotiv played by low woodwinds, including a quartet of bass flutes. Much of the music used in the newsreel was taken from other sources; examples include the News on the March music which was taken from RKO's music library, Belgian March by Anthony Collins, and accompanies the newsreel titles; and an excerpt from Alfred Newman's score for Gunga Din which is used as the background for the exploration of Xanadu. In the final sequence of the film, which shows the destruction of Rosebud in the fireplace of Kane's castle, Welles choreographed the scene while he had Herrmann's cue playing on the set. For the operatic sequence which exposed Kane's protege Susan Alexander for the amateur she was, Herrmann composed a quasi-romantic scene, Aria from Salammbô. There did exist two treatments of this work by Gustave Flaubert's 1862 novel, including an opera by Ernest Reyer and an incomplete treatment by Modeste Mussorgsky. However, Herrmann made no reference to existing music. Herrmann put the aria in a key that would force the singer to strain to reach the high notes, culminating in a high D, well outside the range of Susan Alexander. Herrmann said he wanted to convey the impression of "a terrified girl floundering in the quicksand of a powerful orchestra". On the soundtrack it was soprano Jean Forward who actually sang the vocal part for actress Dorothy Comingore. In 1972 Herrmann said "I was fortunate to start my career with a film like Citizen Kane, it's been a downhill run ever since!" Shortly before his death in 1985, Welles told director Henry Jaglom that the score was fifty per cent responsible for the film's artistic success. Herrmann was vocal in his criticism of Pauline Kael's claim that it was Mankiewicz, not Welles, who made the main thrust of the film, and also her assertions about the use of music in the film without consulting him: Pauline Kael has written in The Citizen Kane Book (1971), that the production wanted to use Massenet's "Thais" but could not afford the fee. But Miss Kael never wrote or approached me to ask about the music. We could easily have afforded the fee. The point is that its lovely little strings would not have served the emotional purpose of the film. Opera lovers are frequently amused by the parody of vocal coaching that appears in a singing lesson given to Susan Alexander by Signor Matiste. The character attempts to sing the famous cavatina "Una voce poco fa" from Il barbiere di Siviglia by Gioachino Rossini, but the lesson is interrupted when Alexander sings a high note flat. Orson Welles said that the Nat King Cole Trio is heard performing the song, "It Can't Be Love," in one of the key scenes of Citizen Kane, the fight between Susan and Kane in the picnic tent. "I'd heard Nat King Cole and his trio in a little bar. I kind of based the whole scene around that song," Welles said. "The music is by Nat Cole - it's his trio. He doesn't sing it - he's too legitimate, we got some kind of low-down New Orleans voice - but it was his number and his trio." Bernard Herrmann denied unconfirmed reports that suggest Cole can also be heard playing in the scene where Thompson questions a down-at-heel Susan in the nightclub where she works. Reception Hearst's response Hearing about the film enraged Hearst so much that he banned any advertising, reviewing, or mentioning of it in his papers, and had his journalists libel Welles. Following lobbying from Hearst, the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Louis B. Mayer, acting on behalf of the whole film industry, made an offer to RKO Pictures of $805,000 to destroy all prints of the film and burn the negative. Welles used Hearst's opposition to Citizen Kane as a pretext for previewing the film in several opinion-making screenings in Los Angeles, lobbying for its artistic worth against the hostile campaign that Hearst was waging. When George Schaefer of RKO rejected Hearst's offer to suppress the film, Hearst banned every newspaper and station in his media conglomerate from reviewing – or even mentioning – the film. He also had many movie theaters ban it, and many did not show it through fear of being socially exposed by his massive newspaper empire. The documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane lays the blame for Citizen Kane's relative failure squarely at the feet of Hearst. The film did decent business at the box office; it went on to be the sixth highest grossing film in its year of release, a modest success its backers found acceptable. Nevertheless, the film's commercial performance fell short of its creators' expectations. In The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, David Nasaw points out that Hearst's actions were not the only reason Kane failed, however: the innovations Welles made with narrative, as well as the dark message at the heart of the film (that the pursuit of success is ultimately futile) meant that a popular audience could not appreciate its merits. In a pair of Arena documentaries about Welles's career produced and broadcast domestically by the BBC in 1982, Welles claimed that during opening week, a policeman approached him one night and told him: "Do not go to your hotel room tonight; Hearst has set up an undressed, underage girl to leap into your arms when you enter and a photographer to take pictures of you. Hearst is planning to publish it in all of his papers." Welles thanked the man and stayed out all night. However, it is not confirmed whether this was true. Welles also described how he accidentally bumped into Hearst in an elevator at the Fairmont Hotel when Kane was opening in San Francisco. Welles's father had been friends with Hearst, so Welles tried to comfortably ask if Hearst would see the film. Hearst ignored him. "As he was getting off at his floor, I said 'Charles Foster Kane would have accepted.' No reply", recalled the director. "And Kane would have you know. That was his style." Although Hearst tried to suppress the film and limit its success, his efforts backfired in the long run, for now almost every reference to Hearst's life and career includes a reference to the parallels in the film. The irony of Hearst's attempts is that the film is now inexorably connected to him. This connection is reinforced by W. A. Swanberg's extensive biography entitled Citizen Hearst. Release and contemporary responses Citizen Kane was to open at RKO's flagship theatre, Radio City Music Hall, but did not; a possible factor was Louella Parsons's threat that The American Weekly would run a defamatory story on the grandfather of major RKO stockholder Nelson Rockefeller. Other exhibitors feared retaliation and refused to handle the film. Schaefer lined up a few theaters but Welles grew impatient and threatened RKO with a lawsuit. Hearst papers refused to accept advertising for the film. Kane opened at the RKO Palace on Broadway in New York on May 1, 1941, in Chicago on May 6, and in Los Angeles on May 8. Kane did well in cities and larger towns but fared poorly in more remote areas. RKO still had problems getting exhibitors to show the film. For example, one chain controlling more than 500 theaters got Welles's film as part of a package but refused to play it, reportedly out of fear of Hearst. The Hearst newspapers's disruption of the film's release damaged its boxoffice performance and, as a result, Citizen Kane lost $160,000 during its initial run. The reviews for the film were overwhelmingly positive, although some reviewers were challenged by Welles's break with Hollywood traditions. Kate Cameron, in her review for the New York Daily-News, said that Kane was "one of the most interesting and technically superior films that has ever come out of a Hollywood studio". In his review for the New World Telegram, William Boehnel said that the film was "staggering and belongs at once among the greatest screen achievements". Otis Ferguson, in his review for The New Republic, said that Kane was "the boldest free-hand stroke in major screen production since Griffith and Bitzer were running wild to unshackle the camera". John O'Hara, in Newsweek, called it "the best picture he'd ever seen" The day following the premiere of Citizen Kane, The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote that "it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood." Count on Mr. Welles: he doesn't do things by halves. ... Upon the screen he discovered an area large enough for his expansive whims to have free play. And the consequence is that he has made a picture of tremendous and overpowering scope, not in physical extent so much as in its rapid and graphic rotation of thoughts. Mr. Welles has put upon the screen a motion picture that really moves. Critic James Agate was decidedly negative in an October 1941 review, countering the superlatives given Citizen Kane by critics C. A. Lejeune and Dilys Powell. "Now imagine my horror, which includes self-distrust, at seeing no more in this film than the well-intentioned, muddled, amateurish thing one expects from high-brows. (Mr. Orson Welles's height of brow is enormous.) ... I thought the photography quite good, but nothing to write to Moscow about, the acting middling, and the whole thing a little dull." Agate continued his review two weeks later: Citizen Kane has entirely ousted the war as conversation fodder. Waiters ask me what I think of it, and the post is full of it. ... You know now that all the vulgar beef, beer and tobacco barons are vulgar because when they were about seven years of age somebody came and took away their skates. That is one explanation of this alleged world-shaking masterpiece, Citizen Kane. Another point of view is that Citizen Kane is so great a masterpiece that it doesn't need explaining. ... In the meantime I continue to steer a middle course. I regard Citizen Kane as a quite good film which tries to run the psychological essay in harness with your detective thriller, and doesn't quite succeed. In a 1941 review, Jorge Luis Borges called Citizen Kane a "metaphysical detective story", in that "... its subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man's inner self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has spoken, the many lives he has ruined ..." Borges noted that "Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and reconstruct him." As well, "Forms of multiplicity and incongruity abound in the film: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the last, a poor woman, luxuriant and suffering, plays with an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a palace that is also a museum." Borges points out, "At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by a secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances." Legacy Despite the critical success of Citizen Kane it nevertheless marked a decline in Welles's fortunes. In the book Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?, Joseph McBride argues that the problems in making Citizen Kane caused lasting damage to his career. The damage started with RKO violating its contract with him by taking his next film The Magnificent Ambersons away from him and adding a happy ending against his will. Hollywood's treatment of Welles and his work ultimately led to his self-imposed exile in Europe for much of the rest of his career where he found a more sympathetic audience. The documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane posits that Welles's own life story resembled that of Kane far more than Hearst's: an overreaching wunderkind who ended up mournful and lonely in his old age. Citizen Kane's editor Robert Wise summarized: "Well, I thought often afterwards, only in recent years when I saw the film again two or three years ago when they had the fiftieth anniversary, and I suddenly thought to myself, well, Orson was doing an autobiographical film and didn't realize it, because it's rather much the same, you know. You start here, and you have a big rise and tremendous prominence and fame and success and whatnot, and then tail off and tail off and tail off. And at least the arc of the two lives were very much the same ..." Peter Bogdanovich, who was friends with Welles in his later years, disagreed with this on his own commentary on the Citizen Kane DVD, saying that Kane was nothing like Welles. Kane, he said, "had none of the qualities of an artist, Orson had all the qualities of an artist." Bogdanovich also noted that Welles was never bitter "about all the bad things that happened to him", and was a man who enjoyed life in his final years. In addition, critics have reassessed Welles' career after his death, saying that he wasn't a failed Hollywood filmmaker, but a successful independent filmmaker. Film critic Kim Newman believed the film's influence was visible in the film noir that followed, as well as the 1942 Hepburn-Tracy film Keeper of the Flame. Film directors Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, Ridley Scott, Francis Ford Coppola, Bryan Singer, Stephen Frears, Brian De Palma, John Frankenheimer, the Coen brothers, Sergio Leone and Luc Besson are all fans of Citizen Kane and it influenced their work. The film's structure influenced the biographical films Lawrence of Arabia and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters – which begin with the subject's death and show their life in flashbacks – as well as Welles's thriller Mr. Arkadin. The film, for its topic of mass media manipulation of public opinion, is also famous for having been frequently presented as the perfect example to demonstrate the power that media have on a society in influencing the democratic process. This exemplary citation of the film lasted till the end of the 20th century, when the paradigm of mass media depicted in Citizen Kane needed to be updated to take into account more globalized and more internet-based media scenarios. Since the film was based on William Randolph Hearst's actions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that model of media influence lasted for almost a century. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is sometimes labeled as a latter-day Citizen Kane. Popular culture In June 1982 Steven Spielberg spent $60,500 to buy a Rosebud sled, one of three balsa sleds used in the closing scenes and the only one that was not burned. Spielberg had paid homage to Citizen Kane in the final shot of the government warehouse in his 1981 film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg commented, "Rosebud will go over my typewriter to remind me that quality in movies comes first." After the Spielberg purchase, news outlets began reporting the claim of Arthur Bauer, a retired helicopter pilot in New York, that he owned another Rosebud, the hardwood sled used at the beginning of Citizen Kane. "I'm sure it could be true," Welles said when asked for comment. In early 1942, Bauer was a 12-year-old student in Brooklyn and a member of his school's film club. He entered and won an RKO Pictures publicity contest and selected Rosebud as his prize. In 1996, Bauer's estate offered the painted pine sled at auction through Christie's. Bauer's son told CBS News that his mother had once wanted to paint the sled and use it as a plant stand; "Instead, my dad said, 'No, just save it and put it in the closet.'" On December 15, 1996, the hardwood sled was sold to an anonymous bidder in Los Angeles for $233,500. On February 18, 1999, the United States Postal Service honored Citizen Kane by including it in its Celebrate the Century series. The film was honored again February 25, 2003, in a series of U.S. postage stamps marking the 75th anniversary of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Art director Perry Ferguson represents the behind-the-scenes craftsmen of filmmaking in the series; he is depicted completing a sketch for Citizen Kane. In December 2007, Welles's personal copy of the last revised draft of Citizen Kane before the shooting script was sold at Sotheby's in New York for $97,000. Welles's Oscar for best original screenplay was offered for sale at the same auction, but failed to reach its estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. The Oscar, which was believed to have been lost by Welles, was rediscovered in 1994, was owned by the Dax Foundation, a Los Angeles based charity, and was sold at auction in 2011 by an anonymous seller to an anonymous buyer for $861,542. Trailer Category:1941 films Category:American films Category:Black-and-white films Category:Drama films Category:English-language films Category:Films set in New York City Category:Films set in the 1890s Category:Films set in the 1900s Category:Films set in the 1910s Category:Films set in the 1920s Category:Films set in the 1930s Category:Films shot in San Diego, California Category:United States National Film Registry films